WEBVTT Kind: captions; Language: en 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.001 Thank you very much for coming and it's an honor to be here at the Internet 00:00:03.001 --> 00:00:07.001 Archive, which is a champion, as you know, of free access to knowledge. 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:12.001 I want to begin first by explaining why I wrote this book. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:18.001 And it's a book about today's problems, you know, the polarization and the fake 00:00:18.001 --> 00:00:23.000 histories that are going around, conspiracy theories and just misinformation. 00:00:23.001 --> 00:00:28.000 I want to, I mean, I think I'm as frustrated and feeling 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:30.000 helpless about it as most people. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:32.000 Like, what is happening and why is it happening now? 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:38.000 I'll tell you that one thing that I can do is to write about this problem, which 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:41.000 is familiar to me from my experience as a Russian historian. 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:47.001 I have a perspective on the way that cultures that lie about their past for 00:00:47.001 --> 00:00:52.000 various reasons, the trauma that eventually results in the people who grow up 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.001 living on these, you know, growing up with these lies and finding out that the 00:00:56.001 --> 00:00:58.001 truth is something quite different. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:05.000 And I think you see what's going on now in Russia when they actually have a 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:06.001 hard time dealing with their own past. 00:01:06.001 --> 00:01:09.001 So they're just forgetting about it and moving on. 00:01:10.001 --> 00:01:17.000 I want to begin by, if I may, reading you an excerpt, I won't be doing this much, 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:22.001 but, or at all after this, but I wanted to read you an excerpt from my book 00:01:22.001 --> 00:01:29.001 about, about why Russia is a good example of what 00:01:29.001 --> 00:01:35.001 may lay in store for us if we don't stand up for a truthful 00:01:35.001 --> 00:01:37.000 examination of our past. 00:01:38.001 --> 00:01:43.001 So in 2016, it became starkly evident that the Internet can be easily used by bad 00:01:43.001 --> 00:01:48.001 actors to deliberately circulate stories they know to be untrue, especially about 00:01:48.001 --> 00:01:50.001 the American past and present. 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:55.000 All disease control of the future, that is, is not really a struggle for the 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:58.000 past, it's a struggle for the future and our identity. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:04.000 The bizarre barrage of fake facts and elaborate conspiracies surprised many 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:08.000 people, and I contend that it shouldn't have if we were paying attention. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:14.000 The real surprise is how many people believed these stories, defended them, and 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:16.001 identified those who didn't believe them, not as misguided 00:02:16.001 --> 00:02:18.001 fellow citizens, but as enemies. 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:22.001 This is the beginning of the breakdown of civil society, in my opinion. 00:02:23.001 --> 00:02:27.000 And I knew this nefarious way of doing politics, it was very familiar to me 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:29.001 because of my experience as a Russian historian. 00:02:30.001 --> 00:02:34.001 I'm going to reach back to a time that, fortunately, most of you will remember. 00:02:35.001 --> 00:02:40.001 In 1982, 83, I was a Fulbright fellow in Moscow and Leningrad, where I conducted 00:02:40.001 --> 00:02:43.000 archival research for my doctoral dissertation. 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:49.000 Despite the fact that my topic was the ruling elite of the 17th century, I was 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:51.001 still denied access to many files I requested. 00:02:52.001 --> 00:02:56.000 Sometimes I was told they didn't exist, and I knew better because a Russian 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:59.000 colleague of mine was actually working on those files. 00:02:59.001 --> 00:03:02.001 But I could never say anything to the archivist because it would get him in 00:03:02.001 --> 00:03:07.000 trouble, and that was something that was impossible for me. 00:03:07.000 --> 00:03:10.000 That said, the logic of denial was impeccable. 00:03:10.001 --> 00:03:14.001 The way the Soviets construct their history, there was absolutely nothing in the 00:03:14.001 --> 00:03:16.001 Russian past that was truly past. 00:03:17.001 --> 00:03:19.000 Sounds like Faulkner, right? 00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:25.000 Their historical record was carefully edited to be a narrative, leading to, in a 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.001 predetermined fashion, to the end of class struggle and the 00:03:28.001 --> 00:03:30.000 ultimate triumph of the proletariat. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:34.001 Now, people in the academy call this teleological, that is a sort of 00:03:34.001 --> 00:03:36.000 predestined view of history. 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:39.001 Things are going to happen a certain way, and in America it 00:03:39.001 --> 00:03:42.000 has been called manifest destiny. 00:03:42.001 --> 00:03:44.001 There's some place we're all going and we're destined to get 00:03:44.001 --> 00:03:46.000 there, no matter the cost. 00:03:48.001 --> 00:03:51.000 I knew all this going into the archives. 00:03:51.001 --> 00:03:55.000 The denial was more infuriating, but they were not surprising. 00:03:55.001 --> 00:04:00.000 What I had not fully grasped when I came to Russia, though, or the Soviet Union, 00:04:00.000 --> 00:04:04.000 were the everyday consequences of imposing a fake narrative on 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:06.000 hundreds of millions of people. 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:11.001 That epiphany happened one day when my Soviet roommate, who was from the closed 00:04:11.001 --> 00:04:17.000 military city of Vladivostok on the Pacific, the military city, returned from a 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:21.001 four-hour scour of food markets across Leningrad and showed me her price 00:04:21.001 --> 00:04:23.001 purchase was a kilo of butter. 00:04:23.001 --> 00:04:29.000 Butter was a scarce commodity, even in well-provisioned cities like Leningrad, 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:30.001 Moscow and Vladivostok. 00:04:31.001 --> 00:04:33.001 Believe me, I was really happy to see the butter. 00:04:34.001 --> 00:04:37.000 There was enough lard in my diet as it was. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:40.001 She beamed with the pride of someone who had just won the 00:04:40.001 --> 00:04:42.001 lottery, and she had every right to gloat. 00:04:44.001 --> 00:04:49.001 She asked me how often butter is available in our markets, and I said always. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:54.000 And actually, I had just read the International Herald Tribune's story about 00:04:54.000 --> 00:04:59.001 midwestern dairy farmers dumping tons of cheese to protest the farm subsidy that 00:04:59.001 --> 00:05:01.001 had just passed in Congress. 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:05.000 But I just couldn't bring myself to tell her the story. 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:07.000 A fact. 00:05:07.001 --> 00:05:10.000 But always, as a concept was so far from what she could even 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:12.001 imagine, that she had to take a beat. 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:17.001 Then, pulling herself up in all her dignified skepticism, she said in a tone 00:05:17.001 --> 00:05:22.001 somewhere between pity and condescension that she understood naturally I was a 00:05:22.001 --> 00:05:26.001 patriot and quick to defend my motherland, but I did not need to lie. 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:31.000 When I protested that I wasn't lying, she grew indignant. 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:35.000 I had just confirmed everything she'd heard about capitalists. 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:40.000 Now, that story is to me quite tragic. 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:46.000 I think it bears a lot of resemblance to actually talking about facts with 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:50.001 certain people in this country and elsewhere about what is going on. 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:56.000 I think there's a lot that my conversation with Rick will bring out about how 00:05:56.000 --> 00:06:00.001 this happens and what we can do about the fact that the discourse we have now 00:06:00.001 --> 00:06:02.000 is further polarizing us. 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:06.000 We seem to have lost contact with simple facts. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:10.000 I will turn it over to Rick to ask me some challenging questions. 00:06:11.000 --> 00:06:11.000 Thank you. 00:06:15.000 --> 00:06:16.001 Thank you, Abby. 00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:18.001 Thanks to all of you for coming. 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:21.001 I very much recommend this book. 00:06:22.001 --> 00:06:29.000 If it's possible for there to be a book you read that helps you feel a little 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:35.001 more grounded in a very unsettling time, a time when truths are elusive 00:06:35.001 --> 00:06:39.001 and facts are disputed, this would be the book. 00:06:40.001 --> 00:06:44.001 It's a great read and it's also, I'd like to say, beautifully written. 00:06:44.001 --> 00:06:49.000 Abby takes pleasure in language, unlike so many writers with good ideas. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:53.001 So the process is as interesting as the product. 00:06:53.001 --> 00:06:56.000 I have some questions for you. 00:06:56.001 --> 00:07:01.000 I thought really I'm not so much expecting answers as discursions. 00:07:02.000 --> 00:07:07.001 This is an opportunity for you in a way to present some of your ideas to people, 00:07:07.001 --> 00:07:10.000 most of whom I don't think have read your book yet. 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:11.001 But I'll begin. 00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:17.000 Please feel free to say, pass, if you don't like a question. 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:24.000 So you state in the book that, quote, civil society and civility itself begins 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:28.000 and ends with a shared acknowledgment of the truth, unquote. 00:07:28.001 --> 00:07:35.000 And earlier you state that, quote, historical truth is antithetical to narrative 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:37.000 satisfaction, unquote. 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:41.001 Historical truth is antithetical to narrative satisfaction. 00:07:42.000 --> 00:07:43.000 I liked this. 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:49.001 This runs counter to the incessant repetition of cliches about storytelling, that 00:07:49.001 --> 00:07:54.000 stories make us human and that narratives help us create patterns and meaning. 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:57.001 Narratives do some other things too, which is what your book is about. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:00.001 Where does storytelling take the wrong fork? 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:04.001 Where do good stories end and bad stories begin? 00:08:05.001 --> 00:08:12.000 Well, I will say that what I find tricky about narratives and stories in 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:16.001 particular, everyone is told, well, you have a story to tell. 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:22.000 And now people who feel underrepresented in the American story say, 00:08:22.001 --> 00:08:24.000 where's my, I have a story too. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:31.001 And I think that narratives are misrepresent the truth about history because it's 00:08:31.001 --> 00:08:34.000 not that history is just one damn thing after another. 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:38.001 There is a movement to history, but it's not always forwards or backwards. 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:41.001 Unlike our belief in progress, for example. 00:08:42.001 --> 00:08:48.000 Why is it that we thought that having elected Obama, for example, that we were 00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:52.001 putting our racist past behind us only to be shocked to find that, in 00:08:52.001 --> 00:08:54.000 fact, Trump was the next president. 00:08:55.000 --> 00:08:58.001 And there's a long tradition of this in the United States. 00:08:58.001 --> 00:09:04.000 So narratives tell us, and here I'm borrowing explicitly from a very intelligent 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:09.000 literary critic Frank Carmode, that narratives insist on having a 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:11.000 beginning, a middle and an end. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:15.000 And that means that the most important thing is that the beginning 00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:17.000 is contact with the end. 00:09:17.001 --> 00:09:22.001 And so in a place like the Soviet Union or even the United States where this end 00:09:22.001 --> 00:09:27.001 is something like progress or the end of class struggle. 00:09:27.001 --> 00:09:32.001 Then history is basically told as a prophecy of that, which it is not. 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:37.001 It ignores the role of contingency and chance in what happens. 00:09:38.001 --> 00:09:41.001 And I don't believe, I mean, I think counterfactual history is quite 00:09:41.001 --> 00:09:43.000 interesting as an experiment. 00:09:43.001 --> 00:09:46.000 The classic one is, gee, what if they had killed Hitler? 00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:53.000 But, you know, it also forces the, it forces the answer that actually if you take 00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:57.001 that person out, there still is the story of the German people and what happened. 00:09:57.001 --> 00:10:03.000 And what happened to civilization in war and particularly in mechanized war. 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:06.000 So it lacks a certain subtlety. 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:09.001 And I think it accommodates a lot of glossing over of memory. 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:12.001 You remember the things that basically fit into place. 00:10:13.001 --> 00:10:18.001 And just the second part I want to make about history is that history 00:10:18.001 --> 00:10:20.001 is, history has no end. 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:23.000 History is just the present. 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:26.000 And it is built up by the past. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:28.001 It's the predecessor of the past. 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:31.000 And it creates the conditions in which we live. 00:10:31.001 --> 00:10:35.001 So each of us is born in a specific time and a specific place. 00:10:36.001 --> 00:10:41.001 And when we are very confused about what's going on in the world, which I say 00:10:41.001 --> 00:10:46.000 would be today, we're really uncertain about what is going to happen next. 00:10:46.001 --> 00:10:51.000 It's instinctive for us to turn to the past, to try to figure out how we 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:52.001 got here from there. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:54.000 I sound like David Byrne. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:55.000 How did I get here? 00:10:56.000 --> 00:10:59.001 Because it's a place that we never really expected to end up. 00:10:59.001 --> 00:11:02.000 And I think that that's where so much of this country is now. 00:11:02.001 --> 00:11:06.000 That it doesn't even recognize how it came to this place. 00:11:06.001 --> 00:11:08.000 It doesn't recognize itself. 00:11:08.000 --> 00:11:11.000 And we don't recognize each other as fellow citizens. 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:14.001 I mean, we'll get to how to address this problem. 00:11:15.001 --> 00:11:20.001 But this question of having a shared, you know, I asked in the book, do we 00:11:20.001 --> 00:11:23.001 actually need a shared past to have a shared future? 00:11:23.001 --> 00:11:29.000 And I think in a country like this, of immigrants, that we have a rich history, 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:32.001 which has many rivlets and built into this mighty river. 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:34.001 But it isn't always shared. 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:37.000 What we need is a shared sense of reality. 00:11:37.001 --> 00:11:42.000 And that's the importance of recognizing history as not a story with a beginning, 00:11:42.001 --> 00:11:44.001 middle, and hopefully a nice ending. 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:47.001 [...] 00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:51.000 Charismatic characters, catharsis, all of that. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:56.001 Try to get a documentary pass to gatekeepers if it 00:11:56.001 --> 00:11:58.001 isn't conventionally narrative. 00:11:58.001 --> 00:12:01.001 So the models are pretty pervasive. 00:12:02.001 --> 00:12:05.001 I think we'll get back to talking about that and dispossession 00:12:05.001 --> 00:12:07.001 and anger in a bit. 00:12:07.001 --> 00:12:14.001 But I wanted to kind of interrogate you as a historian for much of your career. 00:12:14.001 --> 00:12:17.000 You've worked closely with libraries and archives. 00:12:17.001 --> 00:12:20.001 And you've done very important work in this sector as well. 00:12:21.001 --> 00:12:27.000 How have memory institutions served the cause of maintaining and 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:28.001 preserving collective memory? 00:12:29.000 --> 00:12:30.001 And how have they fallen short? 00:12:30.001 --> 00:12:36.000 How should memory institutions, libraries, archives, repositories of culture, how 00:12:36.000 --> 00:12:40.000 should they adjust in this time of what you call source amnesia and the 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:42.000 spread of disinformation? 00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:44.000 What kind of archives do we need? 00:12:44.001 --> 00:12:51.001 Well, I'd like to say that we need archives that have collected a wide range of 00:12:51.001 --> 00:12:54.000 materials and not just things from a certain perspective. 00:12:55.000 --> 00:12:59.000 I will say that as a historian, I didn't think that I would be spending my career 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:03.001 as a historian looking so intensively and working in libraries and archives. 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:07.001 But again, if I could go back to the time that I was in the Soviet Union, I 00:13:07.001 --> 00:13:13.001 realized that there was nothing more important than making facts about the past 00:13:13.001 --> 00:13:18.001 accessible because what I saw in that country and in that roommate was that 00:13:18.001 --> 00:13:24.001 somebody controlled her sense of reality, which means that she had that sense of 00:13:24.001 --> 00:13:29.000 reality is she had a sense of what to expect of what is possible in life and 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:30.001 what is impossible in life. 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:36.000 And the broader access to information, and I don't need to repeat too much in 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:39.001 this, in like the Vatican of open access. 00:13:39.001 --> 00:13:46.000 But the broader the access is, the more free people are to realize the 00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:48.001 alternatives. They can recognize actually how much 00:13:48.001 --> 00:13:50.001 chance has played a role in the past. 00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:57.001 And that to me, chance plays, verifies the idea that people have choices, that 00:13:57.001 --> 00:14:00.001 people have free will, even if we want to get into 00:14:00.001 --> 00:14:02.000 a philosophical argument about it. 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:07.001 But there are so many times in an individual life in which you face a choice to 00:14:07.001 --> 00:14:12.000 do this or that. And if you have amnesia, you don't really have a sense of who 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:16.000 you are and what those possibilities are. They've been closed off. 00:14:16.000 --> 00:14:21.001 I mean, I think this country got into a kind of identity crisis when the Cold War 00:14:21.001 --> 00:14:25.000 ended and it was left as what it considered to be the victor. 00:14:25.001 --> 00:14:30.000 But it didn't realize that the peace is more important than how the war ends, 00:14:30.000 --> 00:14:32.000 even if the war didn't really end. 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:38.000 And so we haven't quite adjusted to what this new role is as a country that 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:44.000 actually is dominant in the world for military reasons, but also is 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:45.001 alienated from its own past. 00:14:46.001 --> 00:14:51.001 I mean, I think that fundamental problem with our education, and we'll talk about 00:14:51.001 --> 00:14:56.000 this again when it comes to how do we actually deal with this problem, is that 00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:00.001 history is now taught in a, I'd say, you have to 00:15:00.001 --> 00:15:02.000 make choices when you teach history. 00:15:02.001 --> 00:15:07.000 But the archives make possible what is available and what 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:08.001 can go into written histories. 00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:16.000 Let me give you an example of a surprise archive story, 00:15:16.001 --> 00:15:18.001 I think, and again, based on the Soviet Union. 00:15:21.000 --> 00:15:26.000 So for many years, there was a communist party 00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:28.000 archive, which was always top secret. 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:33.001 And when the Berlin Wall fell, things opened up. And then when the Soviet Union 00:15:33.001 --> 00:15:36.000 ended for a very brief period of time, 00:15:36.001 --> 00:15:38.000 Yeltsin said, we're going to make everything open. 00:15:38.001 --> 00:15:43.001 And at that time, I was working at the Library of Congress and our, the Library 00:15:43.001 --> 00:15:47.000 of Congress, Jim Billington was a Russian scholar, and he arranged for an 00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:52.001 exhibition of materials from the Soviet, from the Communist Party archives. 00:15:52.001 --> 00:15:56.001 And I cite some of these materials in the book, they're absolutely hair raising, 00:15:57.001 --> 00:16:02.001 but they were very faithfully kept, not just, you know, Stalin's party card, but 00:16:02.001 --> 00:16:09.001 also some of the directives that to instigate hook rows and also the 00:16:09.001 --> 00:16:13.000 first concentration camps, really, and the first mass executions. 00:16:14.000 --> 00:16:19.001 Now, the archivist who came for the exhibition were these, just what you think an 00:16:19.001 --> 00:16:25.000 archivist would be, a woman of a certain age and diminutive and extremely polite, 00:16:25.001 --> 00:16:28.001 but with a, with, you know, with a spine of steel. 00:16:29.001 --> 00:16:34.001 And so, because I was, because I can speak Russian, I was asking her about what 00:16:34.001 --> 00:16:37.000 it was like emotionally for her 00:16:37.000 --> 00:16:38.001 to take care of these materials, there were several. 00:16:38.001 --> 00:16:44.000 And she just said, I knew someday would come. It was my obligation to save them. 00:16:44.001 --> 00:16:50.000 And I think that if we cherry pick materials, or we only collect the things that 00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:54.001 we're comfortable living with, then we really are robbing ourselves of our own 00:16:54.001 --> 00:16:56.000 history and our own identity. 00:16:58.001 --> 00:17:03.001 It's a strong point. We need to collect what's difficult, problematic, 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:10.000 challenging. And that's not always a popular point of view. 00:17:13.000 --> 00:17:20.000 Historical record and truth. You talk in your book about the potential of new 00:17:20.000 --> 00:17:24.000 technologies to expand possibilities of people to tell their own histories, 00:17:24.001 --> 00:17:29.000 record their own voices and expand access to these resources, the internet 00:17:29.000 --> 00:17:30.001 at its best, we say. 00:17:30.001 --> 00:17:35.000 But you also point out that we're failing to preserve digital records that we 00:17:35.000 --> 00:17:40.000 can't and the historical record. We can't in quantity and scale. We don't know 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:44.000 how to get we're trying, especially here that it's hard. 00:17:44.001 --> 00:17:49.000 And that the historical record may be inaccessible and more vulnerable to fakery. 00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:55.001 I think that this is in part happening and that the cacophony of 00:17:55.001 --> 00:18:01.000 individual subjectivities online makes it nearly impossible sometimes to know 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:03.001 what we really know and what we agree upon. 00:18:04.000 --> 00:18:08.000 And so I'm curious whether you think that the internet and civil discourse in 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:13.000 general can actually help people move towards more nuanced thinking, more truth 00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:15.001 based thinking. Is there a potential? 00:18:16.001 --> 00:18:23.000 The potential really starts with, and I'm going to repeat this over and over 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:27.000 again, it really starts with education. I mean, I think that people need to be 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:28.001 taught how to use digital resources. 00:18:29.000 --> 00:18:34.001 It also means that people should know how to read them. So as an historian, I 00:18:34.001 --> 00:18:38.000 would say, especially a medieval historian, where you just deal 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:39.001 with source base, which is scant. 00:18:39.001 --> 00:18:44.001 You have to develop skills to understand what is missing. And the lack of 00:18:44.001 --> 00:18:48.001 evidence doesn't mean that something didn't exist. So in that sense, it's like a 00:18:48.001 --> 00:18:50.001 paleontologist, I should say. 00:18:51.001 --> 00:18:58.000 But I think that if you understand, I mean, I should say, let me back 00:18:58.000 --> 00:19:02.001 up and say one of the things that's so glorious, even if it was overwhelming, is 00:19:02.001 --> 00:19:08.000 that the internet does actually allow people's subjectivities to be clear. 00:19:08.001 --> 00:19:13.001 They can empower people who feel that they have no voice to say something. It's 00:19:13.001 --> 00:19:19.000 also a trap, as you know. And I also, as a historian, would say, gee, this is 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:21.000 certainly not the first time this has happened. 00:19:21.001 --> 00:19:25.001 You know, the people who got access to the print, you know, and the printing 00:19:25.001 --> 00:19:30.000 presses in the beginning were very canny people. They were 00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:32.000 religious fanatics in many cases. 00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:36.001 And I use that word advisedly, but they were, but they were ideologues. And the 00:19:36.001 --> 00:19:39.001 other group that was extremely successful in gaining access 00:19:39.001 --> 00:19:41.000 to the press were pornographers. 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:47.000 And I don't think that's very different from what's happening now. And the 00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:53.000 pornography actually, and the religious fanatics collided when they, when the 00:19:53.000 --> 00:19:55.000 pornography was about the Pope, for example, which it always 00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:57.000 was, and it led to the Reformation. 00:19:57.000 --> 00:20:02.000 So I'm still waiting to see what happens with this new technology and where the 00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:08.000 politics go. But right now, it's just, you know, it's, it's like a goat rodeo. I 00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:10.000 mean, there's just a lot of horses there. 00:20:11.000 --> 00:20:17.001 And they run wild. And I think our children need to, well, they already, 00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:21.001 they are digital natives. And I think it's impossible for any of us to understand 00:20:21.001 --> 00:20:25.001 the subjectivity that they embrace as digital natives. 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:31.001 But they know from their own experience, some of the pitfalls, they know when, 00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:36.001 when to curate a certain kind of personality. And I think the people who study 00:20:36.001 --> 00:20:40.000 this come along later and study will also learn about that. 00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:46.000 But I'm not that worried about the scarcity of what's being saved, or the, I 00:20:46.000 --> 00:20:50.000 should say not the scarcity, but the arbitrariness of what is being saved. 00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:56.000 Because the truth of the internet is there are no gatekeepers. It was, it was 00:20:56.000 --> 00:21:01.000 really meant, particularly the web, to get away from gatekeepers. And this is 00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:02.001 what it looks like when we don't have gatekeepers. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:09.000 And people are free to impose them again. And I think that it's a, it's a very 00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:15.000 difficult subject. But, you know, you see parents in states standing up and 00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:17.000 saying, this is, this is what should be in the library. 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:22.001 This is what our children should be taught. This is how to control their internet 00:21:22.001 --> 00:21:28.001 behaviors. And although it makes many of us queasy about this, it's also not very 00:21:28.001 --> 00:21:32.001 old practice. I mean, it's not very new practice in American history. 00:21:33.000 --> 00:21:38.001 It nevertheless is to me a rumblings of, wait a minute, who's in charge here? And 00:21:38.001 --> 00:21:44.000 if it's parental charge, then let's, let's understand our own obligation. 00:21:44.000 --> 00:21:49.001 And so I think parents have a particular obligation, a particular responsibility 00:21:49.001 --> 00:21:56.000 for that. I'm not worried about the superfluity of information. And I am worried 00:21:56.000 --> 00:21:58.001 about the lack of investment in digital preservation. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:04.001 And I feel comfortable saying that here because this is, as I said, the Vatican 00:22:04.001 --> 00:22:09.000 of digital preservation. And I had a conversation with Bruce Droust many years 00:22:09.000 --> 00:22:13.000 ago when I was saying, when I was asking him about collecting the whole web. 00:22:13.001 --> 00:22:16.000 People were saying, well, he just collects the whole web. And he said, no, he 00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:21.000 doesn't. And so I said, well, how do you actually sample the web? And I think 00:22:21.000 --> 00:22:26.001 what his response was, was very much like what I heard from archivists of 00:22:26.001 --> 00:22:30.001 television, for example, that you learn how to sample materials that are 00:22:30.001 --> 00:22:35.000 significant samples. And so I think there's a lot to be learned already about 00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:40.000 sampling from a field you know, intimately. So maybe I should ask you the 00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:43.000 question, how do we take, how do we get a representative sample 00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:44.001 out of this flood of information? 00:22:45.001 --> 00:22:49.001 I mean, first, I want to say that unlike the Vatican, the archives here were 00:22:49.001 --> 00:22:56.000 never secret. Anyway, I, you know, I'm a 00:22:56.000 --> 00:23:03.000 big, a big proponent of chance. I mean, my whole life has been 00:23:03.000 --> 00:23:06.001 about saving things that were intended to be thrown out, 00:23:06.001 --> 00:23:08.001 and how those are revealing. 00:23:08.001 --> 00:23:13.001 And if you look at, if you go to almost any archives, including the National 00:23:13.001 --> 00:23:18.001 Archives, and you look at acquisition and retention policies, they don't hold up 00:23:18.001 --> 00:23:23.001 very well. After a few years, you know, the 00:23:23.001 --> 00:23:30.001 universal newsreel, though, the one of the five major theatrical newsreels given 00:23:30.001 --> 00:23:36.000 by Universal Studios to the people of the United States and placed in the public 00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:41.000 domain, Universal Studios has never given anything away before or since, but they 00:23:41.000 --> 00:23:45.001 gave this gift to the National Archives, and the National Archives decided that 00:23:45.001 --> 00:23:50.001 it was too much. And they did a retention policy and it says something like, we 00:23:50.001 --> 00:23:56.001 will retain all images of the president of major political officials 00:23:56.001 --> 00:23:58.000 of other heads of state. 00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:05.000 We will retain acts of Congress. We will not retain popular 00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:09.001 culture. We will not retain Levittown. I'm getting specific now. We will not 00:24:09.001 --> 00:24:14.000 retain the endless newsreels of diaper derbies, which, you know, babies racing on 00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:18.000 the boardwalk, Atlantic City, which is kind of what everybody wants to see now. 00:24:18.000 --> 00:24:22.000 And it just didn't, it doesn't, these policies don't hold up very well in the 00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:28.000 same way that a mid-century policy might say that we weren't interested in the 00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:33.000 records of, you know, daily life of working class people or the daily life of 00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:37.000 women or the records of indigenous children in boarding schools 00:24:37.000 --> 00:24:38.001 that would be deprecated. 00:24:38.001 --> 00:24:43.000 So I think, actually, Chance plays a big role. Yeah. 00:24:43.001 --> 00:24:47.000 And let me say that, you know, you and I and people in the audience know very 00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:51.000 well that libraries are built from collectors, you know, personal collectors. 00:24:51.001 --> 00:24:57.001 This was true of what's been saved to film and some music, maps, certainly. 00:24:57.001 --> 00:25:02.000 I mean, there are people, groups of people who dedicate themselves to saving 00:25:02.000 --> 00:25:07.000 these things. And it's interesting, I do some advising for the Schlesinger 00:25:07.000 --> 00:25:09.001 Library at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. 00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.001 And it's a library which documents the life of women, particularly in the United 00:25:14.001 --> 00:25:19.001 States. And it's amazing to discover the richness of materials that it would 00:25:19.001 --> 00:25:22.001 save, family materials, which it would save by women. 00:25:22.001 --> 00:25:26.000 And so I was talking to the director of the library, who's an American historian, 00:25:26.001 --> 00:25:30.001 and she said, you know, I think I might even make my next book about the role of 00:25:30.001 --> 00:25:34.000 women and memory in American life, because it is the women primarily 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:36.000 who save these things. 00:25:36.000 --> 00:25:41.000 And I think the more we are exposed to African American culture and the memory 00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:45.001 that exists there, it's primarily women who keep these stories alive. 00:25:45.001 --> 00:25:50.000 And so that's, you know, to me, that's a really telling thing that if you care 00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:53.001 about something, even if you think it's a small thing, if it's important to 00:25:53.001 --> 00:25:55.001 you, become its custodian. 00:25:56.000 --> 00:26:00.000 Find a home for it. It will become valuable over time. 00:26:00.001 --> 00:26:04.001 I was privileged to be part of an event this summer at UC Santa Cruz, where I 00:26:04.001 --> 00:26:10.001 used to work on Chicanx feminist archiving practices, and a number of these women 00:26:10.001 --> 00:26:16.000 activists proudly laid claim to identity as hoarders. 00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:21.000 And they, you know, and some of these women activists had had had like 50 00:26:21.000 --> 00:26:26.000 stairlight bins, you know, crammed full of the record of 00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:27.001 activism in the borderlands. 00:26:28.000 --> 00:26:33.001 And hoarding was not a dirty word, nor was it a sign of distress. It was a paying 00:26:33.001 --> 00:26:35.000 and forward to the future. 00:26:36.001 --> 00:26:43.001 So, you know, historical evidence, reading your book had me musing as an 00:26:43.001 --> 00:26:48.000 ornery, moving image archivist, about how we value historical evidence less 00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:50.000 than historical spectacle. 00:26:50.001 --> 00:26:56.000 And in commercial media, there's a trend to printify historical imagery, and as 00:26:56.000 --> 00:26:58.001 people in showbiz say, make it more compelling. 00:26:58.001 --> 00:27:04.001 One of the canonical examples of this is the colorization of Holocaust images, 00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.001 the colorization of the images of people who are about to become victims of 00:27:09.001 --> 00:27:11.000 the Cambodian genocide. 00:27:11.001 --> 00:27:15.001 And it seems a little bit like Gresham's law, where, you know, bad money tends to 00:27:15.001 --> 00:27:19.000 drive out good, perhaps false images drive out images 00:27:19.000 --> 00:27:20.001 that are a little more authentic. 00:27:21.001 --> 00:27:27.001 You talk about this in the book, and you mentioned the artist, Gerhard Richter's 00:27:27.001 --> 00:27:32.001 objective approach to the past, your words, presenting images that neither 00:27:32.001 --> 00:27:35.001 glorify nor vilify the past. 00:27:36.001 --> 00:27:42.000 He's painting, you know, members of the Badar-Meinhof gang, controversial, 00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:44.000 loaded images in Germany. 00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:50.001 Where else are you seeing art, writing, thinking that helps us, as you say, see 00:27:50.001 --> 00:27:53.001 the world in all of this radical reality? 00:27:54.001 --> 00:27:59.000 Yeah, radical reality. So, you know, I was thinking very much about some 00:27:59.000 --> 00:28:03.000 contemporary examples beyond Gerhard Richter, who's quite an amazing artist, who 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:09.001 has taken his responsibility, grappling with the German past, and has worked out 00:28:09.001 --> 00:28:14.001 a technique of painting from photographs, some of them seem quite banal, and 00:28:14.001 --> 00:28:21.000 using a specific technique of blurring to indicate that, well, it's a real image, 00:28:21.000 --> 00:28:24.000 but it's been through the glass of memory. 00:28:24.000 --> 00:28:30.000 Anyway, I mean, I tried to describe what that magic is, but, you know, I was very 00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:34.000 struck, I mean, you're asking about other examples, and I'm having a hard time 00:28:34.000 --> 00:28:39.000 coming up with some, other than one that really struck me very deeply this 00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:44.001 summer, an exhibition I saw at the D'Onne, which probably many of you saw of 00:28:44.001 --> 00:28:49.001 Kehinde Wiley, an African-American artist, well-known, I think best known for his 00:28:49.001 --> 00:28:52.000 portraits of President Obama. 00:28:52.000 --> 00:28:57.000 But what struck me most in this show, it's called the Archaeology of Silence, was 00:28:57.000 --> 00:29:03.000 that he used, I mean, he's just a stunning artist, he used the tropes that are 00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:04.001 familiar from Western art. 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:10.000 You know, some Roman soldiers, and I mean, Roman statues that you would be 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:15.000 familiar with, and then some rifts on paintings and statues that always seem 00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:18.000 familiar to anyone who's been in an art museum. 00:29:18.000 --> 00:29:24.001 And he has black people in them, so that the fallen soldier, or 00:29:24.001 --> 00:29:29.001 the fallen soldier, is in fact a kid in a hoodie. 00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:37.000 And so what I find so compelling about that is that he's taking images that are 00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:42.000 familiar and defamiliarizing them, and inviting us to see things. 00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:47.000 It's not just that he's saying, okay, we're worthy of high art too. He's trying 00:29:47.000 --> 00:29:53.000 to get us to see, as far as I know, or as far as I understood, to see behind the 00:29:53.000 --> 00:29:55.001 cliches of what we see every day. 00:29:56.000 --> 00:30:00.000 And I mean, I'll never forget the images there. I mean, besides, like Gehar 00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:04.000 Richter, he's an artist with a fantastic studio of artisans. 00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:10.000 So just the sheer artistry of his work was stunning, and like Richter, you just 00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:13.000 wanted to look at it. I mean, if possible, I would have touched 00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:14.001 it. It was just so real. 00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:21.000 And so I was captivated by the beauty of it, and then I saw that he had captured 00:30:21.000 --> 00:30:27.000 my emotion and my eye, but he had a lot to say once he had my attention. 00:30:28.000 --> 00:30:33.001 You know, what I think is true of what's going on in culture today with fact and 00:30:33.001 --> 00:30:40.000 fiction is that with fewer people sitting down and reading, unless, I don't know, 00:30:40.001 --> 00:30:45.000 until they get a certain age, you know, most information about history is 00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:47.001 apprehended visually by the American public. 00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:52.000 So they see, I mean, a stunning number of television series that are set in a 00:30:52.000 --> 00:30:55.000 mythical past that kind of passes for real, you 00:30:55.000 --> 00:30:57.000 know, Game of Thrones and that kind of thing. 00:30:57.000 --> 00:31:02.001 It's very entertaining, but it's a story. There are heroes and villains. It can 00:31:02.001 --> 00:31:05.001 be very disturbing, but it's got the satisfaction of a 00:31:05.001 --> 00:31:07.000 narrative, and it's a real spectacle. 00:31:07.000 --> 00:31:14.000 So I think that that's one reason why, you know, any representation of the past 00:31:14.000 --> 00:31:17.001 is in film is so slanted. 00:31:17.001 --> 00:31:23.000 There are a number of filmmakers who endeavor to make things extremely authentic, 00:31:23.001 --> 00:31:27.000 but at least from an historian's point of view, there's always, and they have 00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:31.000 historical advisors, but they have to tell a story that leaves out a lot of the 00:31:31.000 --> 00:31:33.000 significant boring details. 00:31:33.001 --> 00:31:38.001 And the people who lived through these experiences in real life in the past lived 00:31:38.001 --> 00:31:40.000 through that boring stuff too. 00:31:41.000 --> 00:31:45.001 And so the texture of history in the passage of time is quite different. 00:31:46.001 --> 00:31:52.000 I will say one more thing as a historian. What really kind of cracks me up about 00:31:52.000 --> 00:31:57.000 some of these is they have a figure who is in the past and they're writing, 00:31:57.001 --> 00:31:59.000 and they write with their left hand. 00:31:59.001 --> 00:32:05.000 And I'm thinking, when did we all decide that it was okay to write with our left 00:32:05.000 --> 00:32:08.001 hand? I mean, only a couple of decades ago, actually. 00:32:09.001 --> 00:32:16.000 So there are just little things like that that, I mean, it strikes me because I 00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:18.000 know about that and because my brother was a lefty. 00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:25.000 But I think the context, the thing about film and television is that 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:30.000 the visual fills out a picture completely and you get information, and you take 00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:32.001 that information in whether you know it or not. 00:32:32.001 --> 00:32:39.000 And so the more accurate it is, the more easy it is to absorb, and the richer it 00:32:39.000 --> 00:32:45.001 is. But with documentaries, it's really different because, yeah, there's an 00:32:45.001 --> 00:32:47.001 argument. There isn't a story. 00:32:47.001 --> 00:32:54.000 As I understand it, when I talk to documentarians, unless they're of a certain 00:32:54.000 --> 00:33:00.000 breed, let's say, sort of more of on guard, it's always a 00:33:00.000 --> 00:33:01.001 visual argument about something. 00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:07.000 And that itself, like a book, excludes certain sides of the story. 00:33:07.000 --> 00:33:14.000 It is a visual argument that's propped up by immersive sound and by music that is 00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:17.000 extremely, typically extremely manipulative. 00:33:18.000 --> 00:33:23.001 So it's actually a bunch of, it's concurrent triggers. We have filmmakers in the 00:33:23.001 --> 00:33:29.000 audience, concurrent triggers that are scored so as to manipulate the emotions as 00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:30.001 well as to make an argument. 00:33:30.001 --> 00:33:35.000 And then you dropped a key word a minute or two ago, which I think is worth 00:33:35.000 --> 00:33:38.000 dwelling on, which is defamiliarization. 00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:43.001 You know, this is in part, this was elaborated in Russia, you know, by Viktor 00:33:43.001 --> 00:33:48.001 Shklovsky in his circle, Ostra, you can say it, Ostra Nienie. 00:33:51.001 --> 00:33:55.001 And defamiliarization is the principle by which a lot of art works, which is 00:33:55.001 --> 00:33:57.001 making the familiar strange. 00:33:58.000 --> 00:34:02.001 You know, I always, when I used to teach it, I would say it's the way your dog 00:34:02.001 --> 00:34:07.000 reacts to the water for the first time or what it's like to bring a 00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:09.000 partner home to meet your parents. 00:34:09.000 --> 00:34:13.000 You know, everything suddenly looks a little bit different, everything looks a 00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:17.001 little bit strange. This is a wonderful artistic strategy and I think it's a way 00:34:17.001 --> 00:34:22.001 to think about social reality and our condition as well. 00:34:22.001 --> 00:34:29.000 It's a long trajectory from Gerhard Riechter to Resevoir Dogs, but I think Res 00:34:29.000 --> 00:34:31.000 Dogs actually does this beautifully. 00:34:31.000 --> 00:34:37.001 You know, that's a show that defamiliarizes everything that we might think about 00:34:37.001 --> 00:34:42.000 indigeneity and native people, but it also defamiliarizes all of our 00:34:42.000 --> 00:34:43.001 assumptions about what TV should be. 00:34:44.001 --> 00:34:49.000 And I think that that's, you know, going to open up a lot of people's minds over 00:34:49.000 --> 00:34:52.001 time. There's a lot of good TV like that these days. 00:34:54.000 --> 00:34:55.001 Gosh, there's so many things. 00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:07.000 You know, you have this great quote from Yevgeny Zamyatin's utopian novel, 00:35:07.001 --> 00:35:09.000 We. Has anybody read We? 00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:15.000 Sort of, yes, science fiction in a way. It's about the social function of closed 00:35:15.000 --> 00:35:18.000 and final narratives that explain everything. 00:35:18.001 --> 00:35:23.001 The quote is, final things are for children because infinity scares children. And 00:35:23.001 --> 00:35:27.000 it's important that children sleep peacefully at night, kind of a 00:35:27.000 --> 00:35:29.001 paternalistic view. 00:35:29.001 --> 00:35:36.000 And I'm interested in the equation of why is amnesia so attractive? Can we equate 00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:41.000 the explosion of amnesia with youth, which is sort of socially defined as good, 00:35:41.001 --> 00:35:48.000 exciting, looking forward, and the rejection of memory, the rejection of history 00:35:48.000 --> 00:35:51.001 with age, you know, aging, which is sort of bad. 00:35:51.001 --> 00:35:57.000 Do you think amnesia is sold through youthfulness or the 00:35:57.000 --> 00:35:59.000 impression of youthfulness? 00:35:59.001 --> 00:36:03.000 Yeah, I mean, I think in the United States, which has a different culture of 00:36:03.000 --> 00:36:06.001 youth than most any other country I know of, I mean, it's kind of worshipped, 00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:13.001 that, you know, that's a very specific problem having to do with what I define in 00:36:13.001 --> 00:36:16.001 the book as our insistence on remaining innocent. 00:36:16.001 --> 00:36:23.001 This country really likes to have a very good view of itself. I don't know how 00:36:23.001 --> 00:36:29.000 people across the country really took in the facts about Abu Ghraib, for example, 00:36:30.000 --> 00:36:34.001 you know, I mean, or the constant rhetoric of politicians on a disaster saying, 00:36:34.001 --> 00:36:37.001 this isn't us. It is us. It's precisely us. 00:36:38.001 --> 00:36:43.001 There's a wonderful woman who is a social psychologist at Yale named Jen 00:36:43.001 --> 00:36:49.000 Richardson, and she writes about race and she is African American herself. 00:36:49.001 --> 00:36:55.000 And she says that she wrote a wonderful piece for the Atlantic about why it is 00:36:55.000 --> 00:37:01.000 that white Americans claim to the idea of black progress so much. 00:37:02.000 --> 00:37:06.001 Why can we not recognize that things are not getting better? And she said it's 00:37:06.001 --> 00:37:11.001 because we claim to our own innocence. And in the book, we, there's a choice. 00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:16.001 It's a, it's a dystopia because it's a projection of communist society into the 00:37:16.001 --> 00:37:18.000 future in which there's a control. 00:37:18.000 --> 00:37:24.000 This is well before 1984. In fact, I think we're all based his 1984 vision on we. 00:37:25.000 --> 00:37:31.001 It was written in 1920 and in it, there's a controlled state and there's a 00:37:31.001 --> 00:37:36.000 choice. People who choose freedom. I mean, there's a myth that freedom actually 00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:40.001 is a scary thing, that you have a choice between freedom and happiness. 00:37:40.001 --> 00:37:46.000 And who would ever choose freedom and misery and the burden of responsibility and 00:37:46.000 --> 00:37:50.000 choice when you can be happy. And I think that that's the, that's the comment. 00:37:51.000 --> 00:37:55.001 One of the women who has escaped this world and is trying to bring a man out with 00:37:55.001 --> 00:38:02.000 her says, you know, she's trying to explain to him what the attraction is. I 00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:06.000 mean, he's obviously attracted to her, but she represents something as 00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:07.001 well to him, which is will. 00:38:07.001 --> 00:38:13.001 You know, the will that is taken away from everybody in the society. And I think 00:38:13.001 --> 00:38:20.000 that if we as Americans really embrace liberty, freedom and equality, then puts a 00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:24.000 huge responsibility on us, which sometimes we are reluctant to assume. 00:38:24.001 --> 00:38:30.001 Because you'll notice there's a real difference now, a distinction between with 00:38:30.001 --> 00:38:35.001 the way one, one political side understands what those terms mean and the other. 00:38:35.001 --> 00:38:42.000 So, you know, there's an understanding that that equality, I mean, any political 00:38:42.000 --> 00:38:46.000 scientist would acknowledge that equality and freedom actually 00:38:46.000 --> 00:38:47.001 are in tension with each other. 00:38:48.001 --> 00:38:53.000 That, you know, you can't say that all people are equal and then everybody gets 00:38:53.000 --> 00:38:56.001 to choose what they want to do because it impinges on everybody else. So there's 00:38:56.001 --> 00:39:00.000 an argument about where freedom begins and ends. 00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:06.000 And I think that one of the ways that we can get back to the 00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:12.000 harmony that we want or get forward to the harmony we want, we don't go 00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:17.000 backwards, is to examine deeply those tensions between freedom and 00:39:17.000 --> 00:39:18.001 equality and accept those responsibilities. 00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:22.001 I mean, there are some other things I could say about how we all get back 00:39:22.001 --> 00:39:28.000 together again. But I think that in a democracy which has these values, very 00:39:28.000 --> 00:39:33.001 dear, which come from the Enlightenment, many centuries ago, we 00:39:33.001 --> 00:39:35.000 don't live in the world of the Enlightenment. 00:39:35.000 --> 00:39:39.000 We actually live in a world that is very influenced by the idea that we're 00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:43.000 actually biological creatures as well, and that there's a very strong emotional 00:39:43.000 --> 00:39:49.001 and mammalian part of us, you know, the compulsion, for example, 00:39:49.001 --> 00:39:51.000 the addiction, all that kind of stuff. 00:39:51.001 --> 00:39:58.000 It's the same conundrum we get when people in science, for example, say, 00:39:58.001 --> 00:40:02.001 well, we just need to explain facts. We just need to explain what's really true. 00:40:03.000 --> 00:40:08.001 There's a mistake in logic there, which is not about facts. It's about a sense of 00:40:08.001 --> 00:40:12.001 who we are and loyalty. So I mean, we could talk more about that, but, you know, 00:40:13.000 --> 00:40:15.000 we've been taking sides rather than embracing 00:40:15.000 --> 00:40:16.001 the truth, because it's really hard. 00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:23.000 Well, maybe another way to get at this. This is really my last significant 00:40:23.000 --> 00:40:26.001 question, and I want to ask you one more tiny little thing, but this is a 00:40:26.001 --> 00:40:31.000 terrible time to lose our collective memory, preserving liberty, equality, and 00:40:31.000 --> 00:40:34.001 democracy, and protecting us all from universal threats. 00:40:34.001 --> 00:40:39.000 I'm thinking climate change, of course, require us to act mindfully and quickly. 00:40:39.000 --> 00:40:41.000 Where should we start? What are the wedges? 00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:48.001 Well, I think the first thing, incidentally, I know that 00:40:48.001 --> 00:40:55.000 the book points to a lot of things which could make people pessimistic, but it is 00:40:55.000 --> 00:40:59.000 an attempt, actually, to lay out the ground so that people have some knowledge 00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:02.000 and understanding of the choices that they have. 00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:06.001 And if they choose to ignore things, then it's really perilous. But, you know, 00:41:06.001 --> 00:41:11.000 I'm going to say something very simple, which is we begin with education and an 00:41:11.000 --> 00:41:13.001 investment in the public sector. 00:41:14.000 --> 00:41:19.000 For some reason, we have really just invested in our schools. And so, you know, 00:41:19.001 --> 00:41:24.000 these are the kind of civility that we would like to get to is not something you 00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:28.000 learn in college or in graduate school or in business. 00:41:28.000 --> 00:41:33.000 It's actually something you learn in youth. You learn how to talk to people. Most 00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:36.000 importantly, you learn how to listen respectfully to other people. 00:41:37.000 --> 00:41:42.000 And so I know that there's a swelling movement in education to reintroduce the 00:41:42.000 --> 00:41:47.000 old civics. It will look very different, and it will lead to what you see now, 00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:50.001 which is huge arguments about who gets to decide what's taught in 00:41:50.001 --> 00:41:52.001 school, particularly to young people. 00:41:52.001 --> 00:41:57.001 What version of history do we teach? But it still doesn't teach children how to 00:41:57.001 --> 00:42:01.001 have civil arguments and disagreements. And I think that's really where we begin. 00:42:02.000 --> 00:42:07.000 It's the only way that we can look at facts and come to different conclusions 00:42:07.000 --> 00:42:12.001 about them and agree to disagree, which is what a democracy is, an agreement to 00:42:12.001 --> 00:42:15.001 disagree peacefully and respectfully. 00:42:18.001 --> 00:42:25.001 So before we open it up to your thoughts on where's this 00:42:25.001 --> 00:42:28.000 work taking you, what are you doing now? 00:42:28.001 --> 00:42:34.001 Well, to some extent, the book scared me as I was writing it because, 00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:39.001 you know, we all have to have this tension about, okay, things seem to be getting 00:42:39.001 --> 00:42:43.000 worse. What can we do? Which is why I wrote the book. 00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:48.001 But I think emerge things are two things I'm working on, and they're very in code 00:42:48.001 --> 00:42:55.001 at this point. But the first is to trace historically where we actually how and 00:42:55.001 --> 00:43:00.000 where we broke with this sense of shared reality, which to me is the main thing. 00:43:00.000 --> 00:43:06.000 Democracies really only work if people share a sense of reality and facts and are 00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:10.001 speaking from the same base. So I, you know, I think that can trace it back. But 00:43:10.001 --> 00:43:14.001 it really interests me a great deal. And there was a lot of the book about it 00:43:14.001 --> 00:43:16.001 that I took out because it was tangential. 00:43:16.001 --> 00:43:21.001 So I want to pick that up. The other thing that emerges from the book is a look 00:43:21.001 --> 00:43:27.001 at the different way that we understand human nature now, then how our founders 00:43:27.001 --> 00:43:31.001 understood what humans are, which are essentially infinitely 00:43:31.001 --> 00:43:33.001 perfectible and based on reason. 00:43:33.001 --> 00:43:39.001 And I don't happen to agree that we're infinitely perfectible. And I don't think 00:43:39.001 --> 00:43:44.000 that we act primarily with reason. And I think we need to get back to it. But 00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:49.000 then the idea that there is this point of perfection rather than dealing with 00:43:49.000 --> 00:43:54.000 ourselves in the richness that we are is really bad. 00:43:54.000 --> 00:43:58.001 And I say this, what interests me about this is that I've read enough of the 00:43:58.001 --> 00:44:03.001 great political scientists of the past to understand that Locke, Hobbes, I mean, 00:44:03.001 --> 00:44:08.001 all these people who we revere now, they all started with a clear definition 00:44:08.001 --> 00:44:10.001 of what a human being is. 00:44:11.000 --> 00:44:17.000 And I think that we now define human beings very differently than what the 00:44:17.000 --> 00:44:21.000 Enlightenment people would define it as, which to me means we need to reinvent 00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:27.001 democracy, but do it on a foundation of, I don't know, just looking in the mirror 00:44:27.001 --> 00:44:30.000 and seeing how we actually behave. 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:37.000 And so I think that the scientists who write a lot about 00:44:37.000 --> 00:44:42.001 human nature and psychologists, but also those who write about animal behavior, 00:44:42.001 --> 00:44:48.001 are some of the people I really look to now as helping us understand ourselves in 00:44:48.001 --> 00:44:53.001 the context of this new Darwinian view of what human nature is. 00:44:53.001 --> 00:44:57.000 Okay. 00:45:00.000 --> 00:45:01.001 Thank you, Natalie. 00:45:08.001 --> 00:45:13.000 There is much food for thought in this book, and I urge you to, we're going to 00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:18.001 actually go book signing afterwards upstairs. So please keep that in mind. 00:45:19.001 --> 00:45:23.000 Are there questions? Did I see a hand? Please. 00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:27.000 Yeah, if there are questions, let me pass you the mic or Nicole. 00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:36.000 Thank you for this wonderful conversation. I'm thrilled, very inspiring. I come 00:45:36.000 --> 00:45:41.001 from Sweden, and in Sweden, the history of writing shows a lot about the 00:45:41.001 --> 00:45:47.000 presentation and we like a huge portion of women in 00:45:47.000 --> 00:45:49.000 history textbooks in Sweden. 00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:55.000 I think it's 90% still, around 85% is about men. And 00:45:55.000 --> 00:46:02.000 I started a project where we urged women to actually archive 00:46:02.000 --> 00:46:07.001 themselves and to do that in a way to take responsibility for 00:46:07.001 --> 00:46:09.000 the history of writing in the future. 00:46:11.000 --> 00:46:16.000 And this is happening all over Sweden right now. What can you say about that? 00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:23.000 What is the responsibility for us that are underrepresented in history? Because 00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:27.000 the women were, as you say, were also the persons that was archiving. 00:46:27.000 --> 00:46:32.001 They were the main archivers, but they were archiving their husbands, their 00:46:32.001 --> 00:46:37.001 brothers, and their fathers, but not themselves. Can you 00:46:37.001 --> 00:46:39.001 elaborate on that? That would be interesting. 00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:45.000 Yeah, this is a vast topic, so I'll just say that the women's movement in the 00:46:45.000 --> 00:46:49.000 United States yielded the field of women's studies pretty quickly. 00:46:49.000 --> 00:46:55.000 And so a large number of academics now, historians, are female, and they write 00:46:55.000 --> 00:47:01.001 about women. I think one of the best sellers that would kick this off was a 00:47:01.001 --> 00:47:05.000 diary that's called a housemaid's tale. 00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:07.000 [...] 00:47:08.000 --> 00:47:13.001 No, no, no. This was actually a midwife's tale, which 00:47:13.001 --> 00:47:19.001 was actually based on a midwife's diary. And so Thatcher had taken this book and 00:47:19.001 --> 00:47:22.000 just filled it out with historical context. 00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:29.000 But it's a vast field. It goes back so far that it's kind of faded now 00:47:29.000 --> 00:47:31.000 that African American studies is really big 00:47:31.000 --> 00:47:33.000 and different kinds of ethnic studies. 00:47:33.000 --> 00:47:37.001 But at least in the United States, history faculty are in some schools 00:47:37.001 --> 00:47:44.001 predominantly female. And that's another story about equity of 00:47:44.001 --> 00:47:46.000 pay, which doesn't exist for historians. 00:47:46.000 --> 00:47:53.000 But it's also something that, I don't know if Sweden's really caught 00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:57.001 up with that, but I think women should enter the profession. And they should 00:47:57.001 --> 00:48:00.000 write as many books as men write, and they should write about women. 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:07.000 You were thinking of Laurel Thatcher. 00:48:07.000 --> 00:48:08.000 Yes, you were. 00:48:08.000 --> 00:48:08.000 Yeah, right. 00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:09.001 Thank you. 00:48:09.001 --> 00:48:16.001 Thank you very much. Very interesting. So the question I have is the idea of 00:48:16.001 --> 00:48:23.000 shared reality. So I feel like we have polarized shared realities. And that's 00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:27.000 based on kind of what I think human beings base reality on, 00:48:27.001 --> 00:48:29.000 which is common sense. 00:48:29.000 --> 00:48:36.000 And there's a mean census in how we perceive it. And also certain 00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:41.001 archetypal thinking like you mentioned Darwin as model. I think that is deeply 00:48:41.001 --> 00:48:47.000 embedded within our thinking and it's driven capitalism survival of the fittest. 00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:54.000 You know, so I think it's not one archetypal thinking, how we address that 00:48:54.000 --> 00:48:59.000 in terms of how some people, I would say abuse it and use it to bring 00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:00.001 other people to their way of thinking. 00:49:01.001 --> 00:49:06.001 And another archetypal thinking was, which stuck. 00:49:07.001 --> 00:49:09.000 Maybe I just lost it. Sorry. 00:49:10.001 --> 00:49:16.000 So I was just wanting to know how do you attack those archetypal things that are 00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:21.001 deeply embedded in our consciousness through things like Darwin, Darwin's 00:49:21.001 --> 00:49:25.000 survival of the fittest. Things like that. 00:49:27.001 --> 00:49:32.000 Well, it's an interesting question. I think if I understand you, you're saying 00:49:32.000 --> 00:49:36.001 that there are common ways, sort of default ways of thinking about human nature, 00:49:37.000 --> 00:49:40.000 which are counterproductive. Is that what you're saying? 00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:44.001 No, I'm saying that they're kind of productive in the sense they're based a lot 00:49:44.001 --> 00:49:49.001 on our perceptions and our senses, which aren't actually fully reality. 00:49:49.001 --> 00:49:54.001 Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I have no problem with the way humans perceive the 00:49:54.001 --> 00:50:01.000 world and absorb it. But I think that in order for humans, 00:50:02.001 --> 00:50:08.001 what is fundamental clearly about humans, and this again is scientific, is that 00:50:08.001 --> 00:50:10.000 we are essentially social creatures. 00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:15.000 We cannot survive without each other. Biologically, we need each other. But going 00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:19.000 back to the very beginning of time, as far as we can tell, things have been based 00:50:19.000 --> 00:50:21.000 around the family and it grows out. 00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:25.000 And people have been playing different roles. It's a very difficult thing for us 00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:29.001 now because those roles within families and genders are changing so much. 00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:32.000 Actually, they're quite slippery now. 00:50:32.000 --> 00:50:38.000 And I think that it's just a difficult period of adjustment. But I actually, I 00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:43.001 mean, I don't want to attack anything about the way humans operate. I would like 00:50:43.001 --> 00:50:49.001 to find a way to encourage people to be courageous 00:50:49.001 --> 00:50:55.000 and to be truthful and to put down their guard more often. 00:50:55.000 --> 00:50:59.001 And I mean, this is, you know, we're really hard times in which people feel that 00:50:59.001 --> 00:51:03.000 the pie is shrinking. In fact, in many ways, the pie is shrinking and the 00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:08.000 population is growing. And so our defenses are up and we like to blame people for 00:51:08.000 --> 00:51:10.000 our misery. 00:51:10.001 --> 00:51:16.000 This is a typical response is there's them and there's us. And that's hardwired. 00:51:16.001 --> 00:51:20.001 But there are social practices and political practices that take that into 00:51:20.001 --> 00:51:22.000 account and work against it. 00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:26.001 And so rather than saying, well, without getting rid of this human nature stuff, 00:51:26.001 --> 00:51:31.001 it's really difficult. I think that's just a starting point and that we need to 00:51:31.001 --> 00:51:33.001 recognize it and encourage it. 00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:37.000 I mean, one of the things this is going to sound a little orthogonal, but one of 00:51:37.000 --> 00:51:42.001 the things that was so interesting to me about the Dobbs decision is that rather 00:51:42.001 --> 00:51:49.000 than banning it, rather than being the end of abortion rights for women, it was 00:51:49.000 --> 00:51:51.000 actually just turned back to the States. 00:51:51.000 --> 00:51:57.000 That's all it was in the end. And most people, including Ginsburg, believed that, 00:51:57.000 --> 00:52:02.001 you know, that Roe v. Wade was a weak read to protection 00:52:02.001 --> 00:52:04.000 of abortion. 00:52:04.001 --> 00:52:10.000 And I think that once we start to make these national issues, we take them home 00:52:10.000 --> 00:52:13.000 and we deal with them amongst ourselves, we will see an 00:52:13.000 --> 00:52:15.000 incredible diversity of answers. 00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:20.000 And we will see people making state legislatures, making decisions, and people 00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:25.000 will actually move around the country and go to where they feel more comfortable. 00:52:25.001 --> 00:52:31.000 But I think this is the beginning of feeling enfranchised because I think one of 00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:36.000 the problems we have is that young people in particular, and now, like, including 00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:39.001 me, and I'm not young, is it just feels like the institutions are failing 00:52:39.001 --> 00:52:41.000 us and they're unaccountable to us. 00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:45.001 And so the fact that they're being that we have a chance to actually control them 00:52:45.001 --> 00:52:51.001 at least locally is a good place to start because our institutions have lost our 00:52:51.001 --> 00:52:56.001 trust and they don't deserve them, with the exception of libraries and archives. 00:52:56.001 --> 00:52:57.000 I should. 00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:02.000 I'm sorry. 00:53:02.001 --> 00:53:04.001 She's like, Brewster has a question. 00:53:12.001 --> 00:53:14.001 Okay, Library and Archives for two. 00:53:15.001 --> 00:53:22.001 The internet, as you pointed out, allowed people to have a voice, sort of this 00:53:22.001 --> 00:53:26.000 free for all, a lot of information is at our fingertips. 00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:32.001 Yet libraries are under attack in this country in a way that I just would never 00:53:32.001 --> 00:53:38.001 have imagined, whether it's from politicians, banning books, legislatures, 00:53:39.001 --> 00:53:46.000 defunding libraries, publishers going and crushing 00:53:46.000 --> 00:53:50.001 libraries and doing all sorts of things to trip them up, sue them, 00:53:50.001 --> 00:53:52.001 cause them to go away. 00:53:53.000 --> 00:53:58.001 Now the judiciary in the United States is lining up to crush libraries. 00:54:02.000 --> 00:54:07.000 What the heck? What's going on? Is there a way of sort of understanding this 00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:12.000 within a historical context and where does it go? What is this? 00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:19.000 Well, let me just say Brewster that the fact that so many people 00:54:19.000 --> 00:54:23.000 are glomming onto libraries is to me evidence of how powerful they are. 00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:29.000 I mean the fact that they're a repository of knowledge, it just means that people 00:54:29.000 --> 00:54:34.001 recognize instinctively that these are really powerful institutions and 00:54:34.001 --> 00:54:37.000 they're threatening in that sense. 00:54:37.000 --> 00:54:40.001 People want to control access to information. That's perfectly understandable. 00:54:41.001 --> 00:54:45.000 And if I can make a rather mordent joke, there was a Russian 00:54:45.000 --> 00:54:47.000 poet named Osyet Mondostav. 00:54:47.001 --> 00:54:52.000 I read a little bit about him in the book and he was one of the greatest poets 00:54:52.000 --> 00:54:54.000 that Russia ever has made. 00:54:54.000 --> 00:54:58.000 And he was taken down by Stalin. 00:54:58.000 --> 00:55:04.001 [...] Osyet Mondostav just made the mordent joke that he said, nobody values 00:55:04.001 --> 00:55:07.001 poetry more than Russia because only Russia kills poets. 00:55:10.000 --> 00:55:13.001 And so I think that, I mean it's a typical Russian attitude, but I think that we 00:55:13.001 --> 00:55:18.000 need to recognize that libraries are under attack because they 00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:19.001 are the foundation of democracy. 00:55:20.000 --> 00:55:24.001 And I just think we need to be strong. And I know I'm looking at one of the 00:55:24.001 --> 00:55:28.001 strongest people in terms of libraries and archives. 00:55:28.001 --> 00:55:32.001 It's just phenomenal what has happened, both to, with 00:55:32.001 --> 00:55:34.000 and for the Internet Archive. 00:55:34.001 --> 00:55:39.001 And we would give you a Nobel Prize if we could for courage and democracy. 00:55:39.001 --> 00:55:40.001 But I mean, just... 00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:48.001 It's hard, but I will say that one of the things that I find most discouraging 00:55:48.001 --> 00:55:53.001 about this country right now is the lack of courage in people, leadership. 00:55:54.000 --> 00:55:58.001 And I think when librarians are leaders, they are actually, by several polls, 00:55:58.001 --> 00:56:01.001 measured, the most trusted profession in the United States. 00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:07.001 After, now I forget what it is, but it's pretty unlike, it's like unusual. 00:56:07.001 --> 00:56:14.001 And so I would say, take pride in the fact, and also 00:56:14.001 --> 00:56:16.001 take a vacation. 00:56:18.000 --> 00:56:21.001 I mean, it's hard work, but it's really hard work. 00:56:21.001 --> 00:56:25.001 But I have no doubt that fighting for democracy means fighting 00:56:25.001 --> 00:56:27.000 for libraries and vice versa. 00:56:31.001 --> 00:56:33.000 Do you have anything? 00:56:33.000 --> 00:56:38.001 I think we have one more, actually. Yes, you're the last, Andrew. 00:56:41.001 --> 00:56:47.001 So, you know, one of the conclusions seems to be we should like capture as much 00:56:47.001 --> 00:56:51.000 information as possible and resist these narratives. 00:56:51.001 --> 00:56:58.001 Yet, at the end of the day, humans still seem to be narrative creatures and 00:56:58.001 --> 00:57:01.001 sort of desire these stories to make sense of the world. 00:57:02.001 --> 00:57:08.001 And I'm wondering if, you know, on the scale of, you know, on one side we have 00:57:08.001 --> 00:57:12.000 exposing people to the full onslaught of information. 00:57:12.001 --> 00:57:17.000 On the other hand, we have exposing them to narratives that are maybe more 00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:21.000 conducive to, you know, selecting information, but the narratives are more 00:57:21.000 --> 00:57:23.001 conducive to civility, multiculturalism. 00:57:23.001 --> 00:57:30.001 You know, like, what do we do here? Do we just sort of not curate the 00:57:30.001 --> 00:57:32.001 information and expose everyone to it? 00:57:33.000 --> 00:57:39.000 Or do we sort of lift up narratives that will hopefully live to a more civil 00:57:39.000 --> 00:57:43.000 society, but also acknowledge that we're erasing a lot of the information 00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:44.001 in creating these narratives? 00:57:45.001 --> 00:57:49.000 You know, as long as we're collecting everything, a narrative 00:57:49.000 --> 00:57:50.001 doesn't erase anything. 00:57:50.001 --> 00:57:53.001 It's an interpretation, and it is a way to make sense. 00:57:54.000 --> 00:57:59.000 What I'm arguing for is the maximum amount of evidence made available to people. 00:57:59.001 --> 00:58:03.001 I mean, one reason, again, I'm speaking as a professional, one reason why history 00:58:03.001 --> 00:58:08.000 keeps getting retold is because people have different interests over time. 00:58:08.001 --> 00:58:10.001 And they want to go back to the past and find 00:58:10.001 --> 00:58:12.000 something that makes sense of the present. 00:58:12.001 --> 00:58:15.001 They want to know who they are and where they came from. 00:58:15.001 --> 00:58:20.001 And as long as a rich body of evidence is there, let them make 00:58:20.001 --> 00:58:22.001 stories that make sense out of it. 00:58:22.001 --> 00:58:26.001 Just don't erase all the evidence that is counter to your story 00:58:26.001 --> 00:58:28.000 or suggest a different story. 00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:30.001 And so I think they're complementary. 00:58:31.000 --> 00:58:35.000 I think the fact that there's a huge evidence base means that everybody actually 00:58:35.000 --> 00:58:38.001 can tell a narrative which makes sense to them of the present. 00:58:38.001 --> 00:58:39.001 And I'm all for that. 00:58:42.000 --> 00:58:45.000 A good note, a positive note. Thank you so much. 00:58:45.001 --> 00:58:46.000 Thank you. 00:58:46.001 --> 00:58:51.001 Thanks for your honor and thanks to all of you and thanks to the Internet Archive 00:58:51.001 --> 00:58:55.000 for hosting such a series of great talks. 00:58:57.001 --> 00:59:00.001 And there'll be a signing upstairs. 00:59:00.001 --> 00:59:02.001 Yeah, that's right. I think it's upstairs. 00:59:03.000 --> 00:59:04.000 So, let me show upstairs. 00:59:04.000 --> 00:59:08.000 It's through in the corner of that room where the stairs up. 00:59:09.000 --> 00:59:10.001 So, take a look at the book. 00:59:11.000 --> 00:59:14.001 And I think you can bring your drinks up to the first floor. 00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:15.001 Yeah, absolutely. 00:59:18.000 --> 00:59:20.000 Thank you all very much for coming.